


Two Minutes

by kitsune13tamlin



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, twinganes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-12
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-03-17 08:44:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,591
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13655505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kitsune13tamlin/pseuds/kitsune13tamlin
Summary: Takashi Shirogane wasn't born alone into the world.  And his twin brother has matched his steps every day since then.  If anyone was going to get to the edge of the solar system and plant boots on Kerberos, Ryou was going to make sure Shiro was the one to do it.  It's what siblings do - carry each other's dreams.





	1. Chapter 1

He’s not Takashi.

He will never be Takashi. Takashi, who’s the oldest by a mere two minutes and forty seconds and wears every nanosecond of that birth order in his very bones.

Not that his twin is all straight-laced propriety. Taka can cut loose and subvert the rules with an almost serene joy. But he knows it when he does. Because Taka always knows the weights and balances in everything he does and he manipulates and maneuvers the scale like a pachinko grandmother who’s riding her entire month’s pension check on it. Ryou gave up trying to match or even meet him when it comes to things like odds or strategy before they were even out of their pre-teens. Taka can turn on a heartbeat, ride the edge of an eyelash, slip through the tightest spot and keep climbing.

Takashi, bluntly put, is the golden son of the Shirogane family.

And, sometimes, he would be lying if Ryou didn’t admit it was hard, seeing that gleam ahead of him all the time. It would be harder though if his brother was anyone other than his Takashi. Because Taka never saw him as his shadow, never treated him like an accessory, never loved him with anything less than his whole fierce loyal heart and Ryou - well, Taka wasn’t just the Shirogane family’s golden boy.

He was Ryou’s too.

There had always been a strong, consistent comfort and reassurance in that steady gleam of gold. Taka had always considered Ryou included in that glow.

If Takashi was the family mon in human form though, Ryou had his own place. Because every mon needed steel to partner it. And no one could match Ryou there.

The first time he got into trouble, really got in trouble, it was when he took apart his grandfather’s prized timepiece to see what made it chime. He’d been six. By the time he was seven he’d put it back together and for the first time in a century it had ticked time perfectly. His mind didn’t make the leaps ahead that his golden twin’s did, his mind dug deep and kept digging. Taka was naming the stars and learning his grandfather’s poetry as soon as he could talk. Ryou had sat in their father’s study and poured over old, vanilla smelling books about biology and chemistry, learning to enjoy the way things slotted so perfectly into place when enough parts were present. Taka mastered _go_ and Ryou card games, preferring the patterns he could watch for and manipulate to make things fall perfectly into place. Taka dreamed up adventures for them around the family fish pond and Ryou built small soldiers out of loose bolts and their grandmother’s fabric scraps to accompany them. When they were old enough Taka learned to make a hovercraft dance like a petal in the wind and Ryou learned to tune it so that it whispered or purred or sang.

They weren’t complete opposites. They were almost evenly matched in combat, training together young, with Taka having the advantage of strategy and Ryou the advantage of recognizing patterns quickly. They both laughed easy, loved bad movies, told worse jokes - but Ryou was the one that would do something just to see what would happen while Takashi preferred figuring it out ahead of time and acting accordingly. That - last trait meant that more than once it was Takashi that played the hero to Ryou’s messes, not always graciously, but, more often than not, wanting all the details afterward, just as knowledge hungry as his two minute younger twin.

For twins, they didn’t often play the identical twin joke. None of the family had ever fallen for it, their cat clever grandmother least of all, and Taka was too soft-hearted to use it on other students or their teachers. Ryou had empathy. His just wasn’t as sensitive as Taka’s. Sometimes a good joke outweighed someone else’s temporary dignity. As long as it wasn’t done maliciously, Ryou was more willing with the twin hijinks. And, sometimes, when he was taking his brother’s actions apart in his mind, curious as always, he wondered… if his brother didn’t play twin jokes for Ryou’s own sake. Because he knew and he knew that his brother could have envied him his golden position.

Sometimes Ryou did.

But that happened less and less the older they got and the more Ryou found his own strengths outside of his brother’s. Because if Taka could pilot anything - _Ryou_ was the one that could build it.

 

(this whole ball got rolling thanks to [some prompts and a picture on theprojectava's](https://theprojectava.tumblr.com/post/159988598583/so-there-were-these-prompts-and-i-kinda) tumblr)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It was meant to carry their dreams, his and Shiro's. Built to bridge the stars. If he had known... Ryou never would have built the damn thing.

He wasn’t Takashi.

He would _never_ be Takashi.

But if Takashi could pilot anything - _Ryou_ was the one that could build it.

They walked around the ship once it was done, closer to it than Takashi had been up until this point.  Ryou though - Ryou had been living inside its guts for the past year and a half.  He’d never been so proud of himself, of something he’d had a hand in creating and Taka was glowing at him, that warm, deep, water-drowning glow that only Taka could glow.  Ryou felt like a helium balloon, floating along next to his twin, feet barely touching the ground, exhausted from far too many months without enough sleep and almost giddy at the same time.  He watched as Taka lifted his hand, laid just the pads of his fingertips against some of the paneling of the vessel, soft and reverent the way they both touched machines and he watched with satisfaction as his brother then stepped forward, laid his whole hand against that sun warmed ceramic, palm flat, soaking in the heat of the giant structure as if he could soak in its personality and essence, eyes closed, entire body going still.  Ryou felt like a proud father or… or a proud older brother as Taka admired the ship without words.

“What her name?” Taka asked finally, in that voice of his that was half dreaming, half awake excitement and Ryou grinned.  Because of course the ship had an official name - but  - Ryou always named his ships private names he never shared, a secret promise between just the two of them, an intimacy that only Taka was allowed into when he piloted one of them.  

“Little Magpie.”

Taka turned his head with a laugh, edges of his eyes wrinkling, and Ryou grinned back.

“Little Magpie,” his twin repeated softly after a moment, looking back at the ship with love.

The ship that would travel to the edge of the solar system, as far as mankind had ever dared reach and then come safely back home.  A bridge across the distance of space.  And the Shirogane brothers were going to make it there.  Together.

Ryou wasn’t the pilot his brother was.  No one was.  But Ryou had a way with machines that was as close to love as human hands could carve and when the twins had joined the Garrison, Taka’s path had gone up and Ryou’s had gone down.  Down into the depths of tangling wires and piping, down into circuits and motherboards and air tubes and compressors, down into the dark depths of ships where welding was a melody and the groan of plastic and ceramic and steel was a deep whale’s song of harmony or warning.  While Taka had been busy knocking every single flight simulation to ribbons because it couldn’t keep up with him, Ryou had been twisting and adjusting and simply creating things that the Garrison had never dreamed for its ships.  They’d both graduated with highest honors.  The averted Venus disaster they both wore woven into the ribbons on their dress uniform’s chest had been Taka’s impossible piloting to get them in and Ryou’s spit and bubble gum save of the giant gas drilling platform’s orbital decompressor.  And, while Ryou hadn’t been along for the Io Miracle, he’d been the one that had just recently installed the changes to the stabilizers in the ship that Taka had piloted in and saved the plunging research station workers with.  The Garrison, the conglomerates that ran the Garrison, knew when they had not one but two geniuses inhouse and, young or not, still untried in so many ways or not, there was no end to the possibilities they provided for the twins. Takashi Shirogane was a rising star - but he was binary, because Ryou rose just as fast on the opposite horizon.  Ryou even had his own team, the pride of a real, honest to God, own team, that answered to no one but him, that he was entirely responsible for, and more projects to chose from for the whole of them than he could ever hope to complete.  The private sector was hungry for him too but - 

but Taka was with the Garrison - and Ryou couldn’t imagine leaving his brother behind and going elsewhere.

He couldn’t imagine creating ships his twin wouldn’t make dance like dragonflies on the surface of a stormy pond like love given physical form.

And now they were going to Kerberos.  Taka - and the ship Ryou had helped build just for him.  Just for this mission.  That he’d poured every advance he could think of, every safety feature, every gift of speed and grace and power and strength he could pour into every inch of it, down to the smallest torque of a bolt.  His team wasn’t the only team that had worked on the ship - but Ryou had gone over ever inch of it until he was satisfied.  The shuttle was _his_ ship and his brother was going to take it into the pages of history. It was the greatest gift he could give his twin.  So far.  He had more plans -  but first, Kerberos.  Taka turned eyes that held stars in them already, on him and his smile said it all.  They were laughing when they hugged, twins about to punch their way right through the impossible into forever.

Five months later, Ryou was in the command center when the feed from Little Magpie went dead.  

The ship he’d sent his only brother into space in.  

The ship he’d built to keep their dreams alive.  

The ship he’d told his brother would never fail him.

 

The entire mission control crew waited a full forty-eight hours - hoping…

But Little Magpie never spoke again.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a year. A year without any echo of his own voice talking back to him from another body. But Ryou's not done. Oh.... he's damn well not done yet.

_Whatever you create you are responsible for._

Ryou moved through the work shop with driven, ruthless efficiency.

Whatever you create - you are responsible for.

A year and a half.  A year since Little Magpie, the ship his brother had staked his life on, the ship Ryou had built as a promise to him, had gone silent.  A year and a half since his brother had left Earth.  And now this.

Ryou hadn’t stayed at the Garrison.  How could he?  How **_dare_** they?  ‘Pilot error’ his ass!  ‘Pilot error’ was just a fill in, just short hand for ‘we don’t know what happened’.  Just an excuse so Ryou’s own promising career wouldn’t be gutted.  _‘Pilot error’._   When the whole command staff _knew_ the ship had made a safe landing, when there was no _piloting_ going on at all.  When - 

the fault **_had_** to have been with the ship itself.

…

With Ryou’s ship.

He couldn’t stay after that.  He _couldn’t._

He could have moved to the private sector.  ‘Pilot error’ covered his sins.  Any of the corporations would have hired him for exorbitant amounts.  He could have hidden away in his work, he could have pretended half of him hadn’t been left to drift forever, slowly baking in cosmic radiation in the pathetic gravity of a god-forsaken moon.  He could have -

he couldn’t.

He couldn’t ignore his betrayal.  He couldn’t ignore his helplessness.  He went over the schematics of the ship until he saw them in his sleep, obsessive, driven, ruthless.  Trying to find where he went wrong.  Trying to find what he’d missed.

Trying to find out how he’d killed his own brother.

A year and a half.  A year and a half of purgatory, lost and adrift.  Where did he go if there was no Takashi to follow?  What mattered if there was no Takashi to smile his pride and approval?  His parents and grandmother mourned in their own way and never spoke a word of guilt to him.  They might not think there was any. But he knew.  He _knew._   And he had to fix it. Somehow.  He always fixed things for Taka…

He’d ignored the calls three times, numbers with Garrison opening codes, before he’d picked up the fourth time and what his one-time colleague had told him had him jamming gear into a backpack and pulling strings to get back to America.

Checking his comm messages on the way there had left him no more enlightened.  Just the team code for ‘respond immediately: emergency’ on two of them and nothing but static on the other, a bad reception on the edge of its transmission range from a number he didn't recognize.

And now here he was.  In one of the Garrison’s underground hangers with less than two hours of promised privacy thanks to both decontamination procedure and command scrambling to find someone who ranked enough up the chain to take charge of this.  And _this_ was a ship the likes of which Ryou had never seen before.

His teammate hadn’t known how the Garrison had gotten it, just that it had just arrived and no one recognized a single piece of it.  Ryou didn’t either but it hummed to him, strange and foreign, the way all ships did and excitement threatened to make his hands shake too badly to work as he stepped into the cockpit past the scorch marks on the side of the doors and floor, over the outline of something the scientists had already removed.  

His colleague was going to get worse than fired if anyone ever realized she’d called him.  Ryou was going to get worse than arrested if he was caught.  And yet - the risk was worth it.  Because - finally - he had an answer.

Not a whole one.  It was wrapped in more questions than he knew to ask.  But - if Taka had been able to fly anything - _Ryou_ had been able to build it.  And he’d started it all when he’d reverse engineered his late grandfather’s clock.  The ship wasn’t a clock - and he had less than two hours to figure it out.  But he would.  Damn everything left in the world - but he’d figure this alien ship out.

Because there was something else out there.  Something beyond the Garrison.  Something mankind hadn’t known about.  Something that had reached through the long emptiness of cold space to touch them.  Something this ship was a part of.  

Something that might - a year ago - had silenced a little magpie as it rested unsuspecting on a dead moon circling a human star.  It was a ridiculous theory.  Outlandish.  Possible but not probable considering the vastness of space and how far on the edge of things their tiny solar system was.  It was a fairy tale for tech heads.  

It didn’t make any sense.

But for the past year of his life, nothing in Ryou’s life had made sense.

He was willing to step away from what was sane.  And this ship would tell him.

No.

This ship would _take_ him.

To find his brother.  To bring his body home.

And to find out what had happened to his magpie and make anyone responsible for it pay.

_Pay like hell._


End file.
